Soon after becoming a Catholic, I started collecting "Catholicana" to hang about my neck. Eventually I was wearing a brown scapular, a crucifix, and a "dog tag" chain with twenty or more holy medals. No joke, people could always tell when I was approaching by the clinking of my medals. I liked to think of that necklace as my "cloud of witnesses." One day the chain broke, and I never replaced it. The only sacramental I continued to wear was my brown scapular.

Whenever I go to eucharistic adoration, I have a little ritual that I follow, something I consider to be a good deed before settling into adoration. I sift through the free devotional literature set out for adorers to use in the adoration chapel while praying, looking for any problematic materials that need to be removed. If I find them, I stuff them in my purse for disposal later.

(Nota bene: I limit this practice to tracts, pamphlets, and other cheap leaflets that the...

A friend of mine who is a Jewish convert to Catholicism was startled a few years ago to find a statue of St. Joseph in the curio cabinet of Jewish relatives and asked about it. They shrugged and said that when they were in the process of buying their new home that their real estate agent had given them a St....